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Doctor Who Series 6.2: “Day of the Moon” by Steven Moffat

**Warning! Here there be spoilers! DO NOT read ahead if you have not watched through Series 6, episode 2 of Doctor Who. If you have, or don’t care, read on, but don’t get mad…**

“Day of the Moon” may be one of the best episodes of Doctor Who, certainly of the Moffat-helmed series. This episode begins with a series of chases, set three months after Amy shot at the girl in the spacesuit. Canton Delaware is systematically hunting down and killing the companions of The Doctor, beginning with Amy, then River, and finally Rory. Meanwhile, Delaware decides to seal The Doctor, chained and straight-jacketed, into an inescapable box.

However, this is all simply a ploy to fool The Silence aliens (see! I was right; look at last week’s review!) into thinking they have gotten The Doctor and company out of the way. Amy, Rory, and River all have strange tally marks all over their skins, which they have made to keep track of the fact that they have seen these aliens, despite the aliens’ propensity for editing themselves out of memory. After Delaware helps the Doctor escape from the inescapable prison, revealing that the companions are all safe and sound, the Doctor injects them all with a psychic recorder so that they can describe what they see when the encounter the aliens, allowing them to further document their existence. He also makes use of the post-hypnotic suggestion which the aliens seem to use in order to force their viewers to forget them, which comes into play later.

This all happens in the first few minutes. It’s a brilliant beginning.

I won’t rehash every line of the episode here, but the rest continues with Amy and Delaware investigating a creepy, creepy children’s home where the girl may be from and the aliens certainly are hiding out. As Amy explores the house, she passes a room with a window in a door. Looking through it is a woman with an eye patch; she closes the window which disappears as though it was never there. Amy finds a picture in the girls room of her holding a baby, which we assume is the girl in the spacesuit. Amy is taken by The Silence after being confronted with the girl, The Doctor and the rest of the companions find and rescue her–in a brilliantly frenetic shootout with River (as the Doctor “sonics” a few of The Silence). He uses the post-hypnotic suggestion to his advantage; as the entire world watches the Apollo 11 moon landing, he interrupts the broadcast with a recording of one of the aliens saying, “You should kill us on sight.” The aliens effectively sign their own death warrant, and it seems that they’re gone–at least for awhile.

Now, if that wasn’t brilliant enough:

Back on the TARDIS, after River has departed, Amy and The Doctor discuss her big pregnancy announcement. She says she must have been wrong, because it looks like she isn’t pregnant, and she didn’t want to tell Rory in case all the time traveling she does gave it three heads or made it some kind of “time head.” They all laugh about it and set off on their merry way, while The Doctor does a subtle full body scan of Amy, which rapidly shifts between positive and negative pregnancy readings.

Cut to six months later, in New York City. A girl stumbles through an alley toward a homeless man. She pronounces that she is about to die, but it’s OK, because she can fix it.

Then she begins to regenerate.

Are you kidding me?!

I literally had to sit there shaking my head for a minute, because Moffat had absolutely blown my mind. My first thought was that, on some strange level, my offhand comment in my episode 1 review (toward the end) that “I’m sure the fanfic sites are all atwitter with trying to figure out how it’s actually The Doctor’s baby” is at least partially true. Amy’s child is, at the very least, part Time Lord.